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SYNTACTIC DERIVATION
AND THE THEORY OF MATCHING CONTEXTUAL FEATURES
by
Tsz-Cheung Leung
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(LINGUISTICS)
May 2007
Copyright 2007 Tsz-Cheung Leung

This dissertation examines the notion of syntactic derivation and proposes a new and more principled account. It adequately extends the notion of transformational relation to constructions standardly taken to be outside the scope of that relation.; One example is the comparison between 'free relatives' and 'correlatives'. We claim that the semantics shared by the two superficially distinct constructions reflects the common syntactic structure, formalized by 'chains' as the 'occurrence(s)' of a lexical item (Chomsky 1981:45, 1982, 1995:250-252, 2000:114-116, 2001:39-40, 2004:15). Two items standing in an occurrence relation form a constituent, which subsumes the head-complement and Spec-head relation (Chomsky 1995:172; Koizumi 1999:15). The occurrence(s) explicitly represent(s) the contexts that the item bears during the derivation. In free relatives (e.g. "Ann ate what Mary cooked"), the wh-word has the occurrences (*ate-main, Comp-embedded, cooked-embedded), with "ate" coming from the matrix predicate, and the complementizer and "cooked" from the embedded clause. In correlatives (e.g. "What Mary cooked, Ann ate that" as in Hindi), the wh-word has the occurrences (*Comp-relative, cooked-relative, that-main), and "that" has an occurrence (*ate-main). "That" is an occurrence of the wh-word given the coindexation, analyzable by the doubling constituent [DEM-XP what that] (extending Kayne 2002). The phonological realization of an item corresponds to its 'strong occurrence' (*) (Boeckx 2003:13).; A derivation is then an algorithm of matching lexical items with their occurrence(s)/context(s). Each item bears a 'conceptual' and a 'contextual' role, the latter driving a derivation (Vergnaud 2003; Prinzhorn, Vergnaud and Zubizarreta 2004:11). Each item contains a set of 'contextual features' that are matched by another item. Two items match their contextual features and derive at least one 'interpretable' relation at the interface level. No matching of contextual features is interpretably empty.; We also claim that narrow syntax is the recursive application of a 'binary operation' of concatenation (+) defined over syntactic objects. The system is free of some problems faced by 'Merge' (Chomsky 1995:226), and the recursive application of concatenation of lexical items entails all major properties of constituent structures, for instance the derivation of labels, heads and complements (also Collins 2002).

SYNTACTIC DERIVATION
AND THE THEORY OF MATCHING CONTEXTUAL FEATURES
by
Tsz-Cheung Leung
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(LINGUISTICS)
May 2007
Copyright 2007 Tsz-Cheung Leung